The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

What a man like me was made of

I should tell you who I was, so you will know what it cost me.

I drove a log truck out of Webster County for thirty-one years, and after that I hauled gravel for the county until my knees quit.

I bought my first truck at twenty-six with money borrowed from nobody. I was proud of that truck, and I was prouder of the nobody.

My daddy had a saying he kept in our kitchen like a calendar. A man who takes owes, and a man who owes is not free.

He learned it at the company store in a coal camp in 1948, where a family could work a whole month and end it owing more than they started.

He said it to me when I was seven and refused to take a biscuit at a neighbor’s table. He said it at my mother’s funeral. I carried it for fifty-nine years like a lunch pail.

So I gave. I will be honest with you, because honesty is the only reason to tell this at all.

I gave because giving kept me on the high side of the ledger. It felt like virtue, and a good part of it was pride.

Every October for nineteen years, I got up at four in the morning and cut, split, and stacked a cord of seasoned oak beside the houses of the widows in our church. It started with two. By the end it was six.

I did it in the dark, with a headlamp, so that nobody would have to thank me. I did not want to be thanked. A thank-you is a receipt, and I did not want anybody holding one.

I never took a ride from anybody. I never let a neighbor change a tire for me. When I had my gallbladder out, I drove myself home from Summersville with a pillow against my stomach.

Evie sat with me in that hospital, and that was different. She was mine. I could take from her because she had never kept count.

Now I was sixty-six years old and a pot of beans had me beat.

Knock twice

The next evening at five-thirty, I heard two knocks. Not a bang, and not a rattle of the screen. Two soft knocks, like a woman tapping on the door of a room where a baby is sleeping.

Biscuit beat me to the door by a good ten seconds, and he had not moved that fast since the Fourth of July.

By the time I got there, a blue enamel roaster sat on the rail, with chicken and dumplings inside, a pan of fried apples beside it, and a clean dish towel over the top.

A pickup was already turning at the bottom of the road. I could not tell you whose.

The evening after that it was pepperoni rolls and a pot of vegetable soup. Then a ham with green beans and new potatoes. Then a pan of stuffed cabbage, rolled tight as cigars.

Five-thirty, two knocks, a truck turning around. I never once saw a face.

On the fourth day, I decided to settle it. I tore a page off the feed store calendar and wrote on the back of it with a black marker.

No thank you. I am fine. I taped it to the screen door at eye level and felt as righteous as a man can feel.

At five-thirty, two knocks. When I looked, there was a pot of pinto beans and a skillet of cornbread sitting right underneath my sign.

The next night, a meatloaf. The night after that, a pan of corn pudding. Every evening, somebody walked up my steps, read my sign, and set a hot supper down underneath it as if I had written it in a foreign language.

I lost that argument without anybody ever saying a word to me. I want you to understand how strange that is. I have been in fistfights that were easier to lose.

On the seventh night, I stood behind the curtain to see who it was. It was Ruth Ann Sizemore, who is seventy-two and has a bad hip.

She took the three porch steps one at a time with her hand on the post, the way you climb when each step is a decision.

She stopped at my sign. She read it. Then she bent, with her whole face tightening, and set a covered dish down on the boards.

I took that sign down as soon as her car left. A man can be as proud as he likes. He cannot stand behind a curtain and watch a woman with a bad hip read his sign.